2020 Democrats are dramatically changing the way they talk about race

Democrats thinking about running for president in 2020 are dramatically changing the way the party talks about race in Donald Trump’s America: Get ready to hear a lot more about intersectionality, allyship, inclusivity and POC.

White and nonwhite Democratic hopefuls are talking more explicitly about race than the party’s White House aspirants ever have — and shrugging off warnings that embracing so-called identity politics could distract from the party’s economic message and push white voters further into Donald Trump’s arms.

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While the 2020 primary will feature debates about Medicare for all and college affordability, the Democratic base also wants to know how candidates will address systemic racism and what they think it means to be an ally to people of color.

The shift is largely a response to Trump. His words and actions on issues infused with race — from NFL players protesting police violence during the national anthem, to proposing a ban on all Muslim immigration, to family separations at the southern border — have roused Democratic activists to demand a full-throated response, according to interviews with dozens of progressive activists and aides to several potential 2020 candidates.

“I think people on the left are really looking for someone that can take on corporate power and eradicate systemic racism,” said Karthik Ganapathy, who served as a spokesman for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential run.

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So with mixed results, white Democrats such as Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand are earnestly embracing the language of racial justice advocates. And potential candidates of color like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Julián Castro are leaning into race in a way that Barack Obama did not — and felt he could not — throughout his first campaign and much of his presidency.

“Let’s just start with the hard truth about our criminal justice system: It’s racist,” Warren said this past summer. In another speech, Warren dismissed “the pundits” who argue that “Democrats have to choose between being the party of the white working class and the party of Black Lives Matter.”

After coasting to reelection this month in New York, Gillibrand declared in her victory speech that “it all started with the Women’s March — an intersectional moment when you could march with your sign — regardless of what it said — women’s reproductive rights, Black Lives Matter, clean air and clean water, LGBTQ equality.”

In a letter to her supporters, Gillibrand again nodded to intersectionality — a framework that considers overlapping prejudices people face — writing that “resistance is female, intersectional and powered by our belief in one another."

And in Sanders’ forthcoming book, “Where We Go From Here,” the Vermont senator argues that “[s]everal years ago, the abominations of our criminal justice system were not widely discussed.” He goes on to credit Black Lives Matter and the ACLU for fighting a system “that was racist and that criminalized poverty.” It's a shift in emphasis for Sanders, who said after the 2016 election that “[o]ne of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics."

The embrace of inclusivity-focused politics on the left has been growing for years with the rise of groups like Black Lives Matter and Dreamers. But Trump has pushed it to the forefront of the progressive movement, especially among younger voters.

“Intersectionality feels obvious to younger progressives in the way that LGBTQ rights do,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder and executive director of Run For Something, which recruited thousands of young progressives to run for local and state office in the aftermath of the 2016 election.

Many progressive grass-roots organizations are instituting new training and programs to improve their approach to race. Indivisible, the largest “resistance” group of the Trump era, recently held its first mandatory virtual training; more than 300 group leaders across the country tuned in. The topic: “Direct Voter Contact through a Racial Equity Lens.”

Regan Byrd, the host of the training, formed her own “anti-oppression consulting” firm in December 2017 and she said business has been good. “I’m a little shocked about how much momentum there’s been,” she said.

Indivisible said its leadership and grass-roots members will be evaluating 2020 candidates with these issues in mind. “We … expect candidates — and the broader progressive movement — to commit to an inclusive and motivating message in 2020 that addresses both economic and racial inequality," said Maria Urbina, the group’s national political director.

The recent, more explicit rhetoric on race among potential 2020 Democratic hopefuls — who, to varying degrees, have addressed racial issues for years — is at least partly strategic. Black voters are likely to be decisive in many 2020 primaries, especially in the South.

“It’s fairly simple--s/he who wins the black vote, wins the primary,” one adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign said in a text message.

It was no accident that Clinton’s first major policy speech during her 2016 campaign was about race and the criminal justice system. “It's time to end the era of mass incarceration,” she said at Columbia University in April 2015. Clinton frequently discussed implicit bias on the campaign trail and used the term “systemic racism” in her Democratic National Convention speech accepting the nomination, the first major party nominee to do so. But she was an imperfect messenger for those policies given that her husband signed the 1994 crime bill that contributed to the era she was condemning.

Trump has helped bring race to center stage for the 2020 Democratic primary and in the process has raised questions as to whether the party can maintain the tenuous coalition of enormous black majorities and white working class voters outside the South it has maintained since the 1960s. People across the Democratic Party agree that race should be part of the discussion, but there is disagreement about how big a part of the discussion it should be compared to issues like health care and jobs.

Potential 2020 candidates publicly profess that it’s not an either-or scenario. But Clinton herself has said that her focus on issues disproportionately affecting black voters, such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, may have alienated white voters. "I don't know if my advocacy for the heavily African American community of Flint alienated white voters in other parts of Michigan but it certainly didn't seem to help, as I lost the state narrowly in both the primary and the general election," she wrote in her post-election book, "What Happened."

Ultimately, choices will have to be made about which issues to focus on and how much energy to expend on turning out the Democratic base versus persuading white voters who’ve been leaving the party.

But the answers to these questions could determine whether Democrats zero in on trying to win back the Midwestern and whiter states they lost in 2016, such as Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — or to go through states with more diverse populations like Arizona, Texas, Georgia and Florida.

“There is no strategy to get the presidency back that doesn’t include winning or being competitive in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Period,” said Tom Russell, who recently managed the Democratic Party’s independent expenditure group in the Wisconsin governor’s race, a big success for Democrats. “The diversity that exists in our coalition that doesn’t exist in the Republican coalition is something that has to be discussed, but at the end of the day they also have to have a sort of meat and potatoes message.”

Strategically sound or not, “identity politics” isn’t going anywhere. And candidates are learning the hard way that there’s less room for error than ever, especially if they are white.

Warren faced a backlash over the rollout of her DNA test to debunk Trump’s claims she lied about her Native American roots. The criticism came not only from her conservative detractors, but also from many on the left who felt she was trying to appropriate the identity of a marginalized group to settle a political controversy.

“[T]here are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American,” Sanders told the Daily Beast. In context, it was clear Sanders was trying to condemn the racism he believes both candidates faced,but many on the left felt he was making excuses for white racists as being merely “uncomfortable.”

Other white potential candidates, such as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Vice President Joe Biden, are receiving renewed scrutiny over their records. Bloomberg stirred controversy this fall when he defended his controversial stop-and-frisk policy as mayor and said he thinks Democrats will agree with him on policing.

“I think people, the voters, want low crime...They don’t want kids to kill each other,” he told The New York Times. And Biden, if he runs, will almost certainly be asked about the 1994 crime bill he helped write as a senator. Many on the left now see the legislation, viewed at the time as the Democratic Party moving to the center to try to look tough on crime, as helping to institutionalize mass incarceration.

Perhaps to avoid gaffes, several of the potential 2020 candidates are taking steps to become more fluent when talking about race.

Warren has been consulting with the think tank Demos, which focuses on inequality, to integrate their language about combining race and class into a single narrative into her speeches, a flurry of which she’s given to civil rights groups. Gillibrand has been a regular visitor to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network since she became a senator in 2009 and earlier this year met with Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper after reading her book, “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.”

Sanders, for his part, has been holding rallies with Black Lives Matter organizers and asking allies like activist Shaun King and Our Revolution President Nina Turner how he can improve.

“He gets it,” Turner, a black former state senator from Ohio, said of Sanders. “He may not articulate it always as crisp as it needs to be, but he does have a heart for marginalized people.”

Nina Turner appears with Bernie Sanders at a campaign event in 2016. “He may not articulate it always as crisp as it needs to be, but he does have a heart for marginalized people,” she said. | Mary Altaffer/AP Photo

Still, some people close to Sanders say he has not added enough people of color to his inner circle or his staff, pointing to the fact that 82 percent of his Senate staff is white, according to the recently instituted Senate Democrats Diversity initiative, which provided data on all the Senate offices as of mid-2018. By contrast, Warren’s office is 64 percent white, Gillibrand’s is 47 percent, Booker’s is 37 percent and Harris’ is 34 percent. (An aide to Sanders said four of the senator's eight hires the past year have been people of color.)

Potential candidates of color like Booker, Harris and Castro are also speaking directly and forcefully about race in ways that most past presidential candidates from minority groups did not.

Booker regularly gets onstage and tells the crowd that he’s there to “get folk woke.” Harris has said that the phrase “identity politics” is deployed “to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It’s used to try and shut us up.” And Castro’s PAC, dubbed Opportunity First, made a point of supporting candidates of color in 2018; more than half of its endorsees were people of color.

All three of them have set out to support and assemble networks of minority candidates across the country.

The frank talk about race contrasts with Obama’s first campaign and time in office, when he and his team took great pains to appear more a candidate who happens to be black than the black candidate. “[T]here's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America," he said in his famous 2004 speech at the Democratic convention.

When Obama did wade into racial politics — such as when he mourned the shooting of Trayvon Martin and said “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” — he often did so gingerly. Even then, he was accused by conservative critics of playing “the race card” and criticized by some liberals over his policy of mass deportations and not doing enough to close the racial wealth gap.

Asked in 2015 for a Vice Media special on American prisons whether the system was “racist,” Obama wasn’t willing to say what Warren and Sanders do now. “I think the criminal justice system interacts with broader patterns of society in a way that results in injustice and unfairness,” he said.

But that was then, before Trump.

“It is inescapable and unavoidable in this country that we have to take on race in a big way,” said Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood who campaigned for Democrats across the country this past election cycle. “I’d say up until a couple years ago, there wasn’t enough appreciation of that.”

Trump’s dog whistles have made white liberals far more receptive to discussions of systemic racism. From May 2015 just before Trump declared his candidacy to June 2017, Democratic support for the statement “immigrants today strengthen the country,” increased 20 points, from 62 percent to 82 percent, according to Pew Research Center. The percentage of Democrats who agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days” went from 44 percent in February 2014 to 66 percent in June 2017, also according to Pew Research Center. Among white liberals, 79 percent agreed with that statement.

An early sign of the hunger for a Democratic politician to talk about race — and the potential political consequences — came in August, when Democratic Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke took a question at a town hall about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. While the questioner was a Republican plant wanting to help Ted Cruz on a topic that he believed would help Republicans, O’Rourke’s nuanced but unequivocal defense of athletes like Colin Kaepernick went viral on the left and helped O’Rourke, a potential 2020 candidate himself, raise a record-shattering $38 million over three months. Still, Cruz, who narrowly won the race, used O'Rourke's answer to attack him with a campaign ad featuring a veteran who lost two legs in Vietnam.

This may only be the beginning. Survey and polling data suggest that the partisan divides on race and identity are only going to grow, political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck write in their new book, “Identity Crisis.”

“These changes in the party coalitions incentivize politicians in both parties to run on ‘identity politics,’” the trio argue. “This is the American identity crisis and it is getting worse.”